The New Housing System is Terrible

[Cagi]

This.

I have a small house. I only have a small house through dumb luck. When they did the last housing ward expansion and people relocated their houses to the then-new wards (which were, at the time, FC and relocation only), I ran around all the original (less-in-demand) housing wards trying to find a now-vacant plot. Many of them had someone already camping the sign and I didn't want to get into a clicking war and potentially snipe a house out from under someone who was already waiting, and the two I sat at clicking while I waited for the timer to tick down ended up vanishing from under me when people relocated houses into those plots.

After several hours I gave up and bounced back to my FC house in Shirogane. And then thought "Hey, I wonder if there are any here in Shirogane." And I saw there was one plot still available. So I wandered over and thought, "Oh, this is a lovely spot. Well, I'll click and get rejected, and then I'll call it a night and do something else." And I clicked on the sign...

And suddenly I owned a house.

Surprisingly, my little corner of Shirogane is actually reasonably active; while I was gleefully playing around in my new yard setting things up, a couple of my neighbors came over to welcome me. Two brought housewarming gifts, we chatted, I put them on my friends list, and I've run roulettes with one of them periodically. When I relocate to Ishgard (because ISHGARD), I will miss my neighbors. So I get what Square-Enix wants with the neighborhoods.

But I only landed where I am via dumb blind luck. And dumb blind luck is not a viable basis on which a housing market should operate.

And given that housing in this game gates participation in other systems, that's a problem.

Essentially this. This doesn't need to come from someone who hasn't been able to get a home. What I've been saying is I see one evil as lesser while it's apparent others view otherwise. Packet makes a good emphasis on this problem since the random timer is worse than an actual lottery. At least with that, people wouldn't be angry at each other for trying to snipe and we wouldn't have to suffer to get it.
I state that I prefer the older system over the timer because the timer inspires antisocial and hostile behaviour. Between corruption and toxicity, I'd begrudgingly take the former over the latter, though it's extremely apparent SE needs to take a step back and go back to the drawing board on how to resolve this crisis, because neither is acceptable, and it's only going to take so long before people ultimately get fed up with their poor management.

[KayRadley]

This is not the housing forum, chief.

[MsQi]

... The moment a game causes you genuine distress just to use a basic feature, you know it needs reworking.

I assume you are talking about how the placards work. I have to agree it is poorly designed. Everything you see seems to indicate that you can purchase the property. It even confirms what you are purchasing for. Then it it says you can't purchase it because it's "not ready". If they insist on having a hidden timer they should just gray out the button or replace the button with the words "not ready for purchase". The way it works now is kind of sadistic. Of course those who do it a lot quickly grow numb to it, but that is not good for people psychologically. It's also just bad interface design. Something that appears like it should do something, should do that thing. If it's not going to do that that thing at this time it should be inactive, or at the very least have some indication that you are taking a chance. Maybe put "Attempt to Purchase Land"?

[NanaWiloh]

I assume you are talking about how the placards work. I have to agree it is poorly designed. Everything you see seems to indicate that you can purchase the property. It even confirms what you are purchasing for. Then it it says you can't purchase it because it's "not ready". If they insist on having a hidden timer they should just gray out the button or replace the button with the words "not ready for purchase". The way it works now is kind of sadistic. Of course those who do it a lot quickly grow numb to it, but that is not good for people psychologically. It's also just bad interface design. Something that appears like it should do something, should do that thing. If it's not going to do that that thing at this time it should be inactive, or at the very least have some indication that you are taking a chance. Maybe put "Attempt to Purchase Land"?

Idea I had on the way home allow people to click purchase only 3 times in one day and no more, unless the house comes up for purchasing then they can click it again.

[Penthea]

This "New" housing system has been around for at least 3 years.

Yea it's far from new. But it is terrible.

A solution to this problem could come from Bozja registration system. As soon as a plot opens for sale, you can register to it. To do so, you need to pay the price of the plot. 1 week after the first registration, the system randomly selects one appliant. This person now owns the plot, all the others get their gils back.

Then people would complain that they haven't won a house even though they tried 20+ times but their buddy got a house on their first try.

The problem with the housing system isn't the placard timers or relocation. It's that the availability issues are so intense that players too often have to rely on luck. There was still a large amount of unhappy players before placard timers or relocation even existed.

Players are going to be extremely unhappy with housing as long as rng is a major player in acquisition. Lottery is rng and is therefore not a fix.

We don't need more or different rng, we need significantly more houses. Well ideally we should have a proper instanced housing system but I don't think SE will do that.

[Luna-M]

There is a new housing system in place? That's news to me.

[Saefinn]

I know it used to be worse, but it is far from being anywhere I guess, acceptable. Because to boost my chances at getting a house at the initial rush, I did the following:
- Had the day booked off, so I'd not be at work on patch release
- Picked up ExitLag to reduce latency
- Moved the game to an SSD (though a good idea in general)
- Had the patch downloaded ready
- Had a game plan, ward/district picked, a best route with a chance of as many houses as possible, and to practice that route.
- Did all of the previous point on Ninja for the extra speed and ability to teleport quickly.
- Had the launcher ready to click the moment it is available

Do all that and have the "Play" button take an age to load because of congestion (or error or crash, like friends of mine had) and find yourself in a 1,700 person queue and find there's no plots left when you finally make it in.

Then find you have a chance at still getting a house due to old plots being given up. In order to increase your chances, you need to camp. Fortunately the community has devised a solution to work out the probability of when plots are most likely to open. With this advantage you're still competing heavily with a lot of people and your 'camping' window at this point is still huge...just not the full 24 hour window. So you'd need to camp to have a chance.

And whilst camping you might find:
- Somebody who hasn't camped walks up, gets lucky and swipes it from you.
- You get up to go to the loo or do any basic human function. And somebody gets it.
- You finally get lucky with 1 other person on it on a plot that's been free for 20 hours and that person is AFK with a high chance of it becoming available and then somebody comes along and relocates their house (this happened to me last night).

As an RPer, I am looking for a house for a specific RP purpose, hence my determination. On several occasions I came close. Which makes the whole thing incredibly frustrating.

We 100% need a better system. It isn't suited to handle this population of players.

IMO, seek to improve on the apartments system. Replace them with an instanced housing system. Not everybody will benefit from being in a housing neighbourhood and would be satiated with an instanced housing system. EG. my FC's house has no active neighbours. The idea I have for the RP housing plot I was going to grab? It doesn't need a neighbourhood and I'd be happy if I could use my apartment like a housing plot, so I could have the outdoor and indoor space as it was mostly the outdoor space I was looking at using. I expect it'll alleviate some of the wards too and make it easier for people who want a plot in a neighbourhood. And give people an incentive scheme to relocate their housing plots to this 'new' instanced housing.

With the idea of improving the apartments system to be instanced housing they could even take it one step further and allow you to change the background scene to match certain themes, this would give an additional incentive for people to use this system than build in a neighbourhood, because your house could be in locations that don't have housing wards, as an example. Imagine having one set in Sui-no-sato? Or on the steppe? Or in Yanxia? Or near Ala Mhigo? Or in the sea of clouds? Or somewhere on The First?

Maybe shorten the max timer wirth a smaller window. Restrict relocation except to the new wards. Reactivate it after a reasonable time after new wards go live. Or just turn off the timer for when housing goes live for the initial rush. It'll give more chances at getting /a/ plot then.

[ADVSS]

With the idea of improving the apartments system to be instanced housing they could even take it one step further and allow you to change the background scene to match certain themes, this would give an additional incentive for people to use this system than build in a neighbourhood, because your house could be in locations that don't have housing wards, as an example. Imagine having one set in Sui-no-sato? Or on the steppe? Or in Yanxia? Or near Ala Mhigo? Or in the sea of clouds? Or somewhere on The First?

Maybe shorten the max timer wirth a smaller window. Restrict relocation except to the new wards. Reactivate it after a reasonable time after new wards go live. Or just turn off the timer for when housing goes live for the initial rush. It'll give more chances at getting /a/ plot then.

Absolutely agree. Better scenery, and they could actually do things like add farming stuff as well as other things(maybe a way to fill an expandable backyard with mining nodes or botany nodes you can upograde to be essentially timed rare spots, etc) I get the neighbors thing, but every FC house ive ever lived at, or personal house ive had, you rarely if ever see anybody around that owns all the houses, so to me its just about the same, besides a lot of deserted city space to go for a "walk".

[Saefinn]

Absolutely agree. Better scenery, and they could actually do things like add farming stuff as well as other things(maybe a way to fill an expandable backyard with mining nodes or botany nodes you can upograde to be essentially timed rare spots, etc) I get the neighbors thing, but every FC house ive ever lived at, or personal house ive had, you rarely if ever see anybody around that owns all the houses, so to me its just about the same, besides a lot of deserted city space to go for a "walk".

And I suppose in a way, if this was a revamp of the Apartments system, you'd technically still have this. Because you're in that space when you teleport to your place. You're still only a short walk away from your neighbours and all the nice extra scenery each district for that short walk. You'd still be able to be a part of that district.

Back when housing came out, there was no "crisis" we were able to set up our FC house in an RP neighbourhood of houses that worked as a great community and people organised it so RP FC's could be in a neighbourhood. This kind of planning would be unheard of now. So the scope of housing has definitely changed with the game's boom in popularity.

When we moved to Balmung we were able to get an FC house without the rush, we had neighbours we socialised with. But since they moved to Shirogane when that housing had come out, we've had no real interactions with our neighbours.

[MsMisato]

Absolutely agree. Better scenery, and they could actually do things like add farming stuff as well as other things(maybe a way to fill an expandable backyard with mining nodes or botany nodes you can upograde to be essentially timed rare spots, etc) I get the neighbors thing, but every FC house ive ever lived at, or personal house ive had, you rarely if ever see anybody around that owns all the houses, so to me its just about the same, besides a lot of deserted city space to go for a "walk".

I want to say, this was the original plan way way back end of 2013ish early 2014 when FC housing was about to be introduce. They were going ot eventually bring housing for individuals which were supposed to be out in the game world in communities and what not with community farms and such. I also remember when FC housing first launch no one bought into it as well and the wards sat empty for a longtime because lets face it, depending on the server, you could easily pay double of what a small would cost compared to today for class 5 plots it was hella expensive. Then they adjusted the plot pricing and they went with opening it to allow individuals to purchase FC plots since FCs were not buying into it. Even then plots sat vacant for an extremely long time.

I want to say it was mid HW towards the beginning of the questlines leading up to StB the game started to take off in popularity and led to what we have now in regards in housing "crisis".